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Category Archives: Weibo

The year of the sheep is here! And with it, as usual, come crazy engagement numbers from Sina Weibo. Unsurprisingly, the night’s most popular messages came from the service’s top celebrities. Taking home the crown this year was model/actress Angelababy, whose photo of herself in the kitchen (below) along with the message “Like this and earn big in the new year!” has been liked over 3 million times already.

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Leading Chinese social media platform, Sina Weibo, posted a higher-than-expected financial report on Friday, saying its net revenues increased 58 percent year-on-year to US$84.1 million in the third quarter. Weibo stock was up 4 percent in after-hours trading after the company released the results. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected Weibo’s revenues at US$81.5 million. The company also forecasted its fourth-quarter revenues between US$102 million to US$105 million, edging above Wall Street’s expectations of US$100.55 million.

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IFTTT , the useful service that lets you connect your web accounts and automate cross-posting, has just added support for China’s Sina Weibo, the US startup said today . This allows Weibo users to connect the popular social network to an array of stuff, such as automatically sharing cool articles from Pocket to Weibo, or posting a daily weather update to your Weibo. But it also makes it a little easier for Chinese to scale the Great Firewall and post to blocked websites. That might not be IFTTT’s intention, but that’s likely how it’ll be used by at least some people.

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The Twitter-esque Sina Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) is now up to 156.5 million monthly active users (MAUs) – of whom 69.7 million are active each day – according to the company’s Q2 2014 earnings. Despite the onslaught of WeChat, which rose to 438 million MAUs, Weibo is still growing its user-base, albeit slowly. Its MAUs are up 30 percent in the past 12 months. The social network is still losing money, however. Weibo revenues grew to US$77.3 million in Q2 – up 105 percent year-on-year – but that was ruined by a net loss of US$15.4 million.

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WeChat and Weibo are huge in China, each with more than half a billion registered users. But their respective might in messaging and microblogging hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from building niche social networks for all kinds of specific groups of people. China’s netizens have, in turn, flocked to these fun and hyper-focused new apps. They’re not meant to replace WeChat or Weibo – indeed, many of these specialist social apps integrate with the country’s top social networks.

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More than six months after China’s Twitter-esque Sina Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) launched a mobile wallet feature, the social network is about to roll out user-to-user money transfers. A private beta of the money transfers is now in testing, as seen by Techweb, in the Weibo mobile app. It will go live to the public in an app update next week. Both the sender and recipient must be Weibo users.

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Yesterday at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei revealed that 70 percent of the company’s daily active users access its service on a mobile device, reports Mobile World Live. That statistic ought to not come as a shocker when one considers that mobile devices tend to get more attention from their owners than PCs these days. But it’s one worth making mental note of as the company continues to evolve beyond from its legacy as a desktop-first social network.

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BEIJING: China plans to restrict Internet giant Sina’s right to publish after finding pornographic content on the portal, a report said Friday, in Beijing’s latest move to tighten control of the web. Sina published 24 “pornographic and obscene” e-books, videos and audio programmes, said the government body that tackles pornography and illegal publications, in a report on its website.

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NEW YORK: Sina Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, debuted on the Nasdaq exchange Thursday with a 19.1 percent jump despite an IPO that went out under-subscribed and lower priced than hoped. In a spate of buying that suggested that Wall Street’s waters are still welcoming to loss-making technology high flyers, and to Chinese firms as well, Weibo shares rose from the subscription price of $17 to as high as $24.28, before settling the day at $20.24.

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China’s Twitter-esque Sina Weibo is now one big step closer to its IPO. The social network has filed a new form with the US SEC that shows Weibo will price its shares in the US$17 to $19 range. If it debuts at the top of that range, Weibo will raise $437 million. Weibo had 143.8 million monthly active users in March.

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Sina Weibo is now officially just Weibo. China’s Twitter-like social forum dropped the former half of its name as it prepares for a public listing in the US (hat-tip to TNW for spotting). The site’s logo has been altered accordingly. The news no doubt irked other weibo platforms – weibo tranlates to “microblog” in Chinese. Those include Tencent Weibo and Netease Weibo, among others. But let’s be honest, Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) won that war the day it bought the http://www.weibo.com domain name.

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HONG KONG – China’s online giants Alibaba and Sina Weibo are both setting courses for share flotations on stock markets in the U.S. Both companies have significant relations with the media and entertainment sectors. Alibaba, an e-commerce behemoth with revenues bigger than Ebay and Amazon combined, has significant interests in online payment and cloud computing and has expanded into new areas such as mobile apps, mobile operating system and Internet TV. Last week the company announced the $800 million acquisition of HK-listed, Chinese film producer Chinavision. Yahoo! has a 24% stake in Alibaba, which it expects to reduce at the time of the IPO.

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Ending months of speculation, China’s top Twitter-esque social network, Sina Weibo, has filed for a US public listing. Sina Weibo – a spin-off from web company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) – aims to raise up to US$500 million from its IPO. Sina Weibo’s filing with the US SEC does not say how many shares will be issued, and there’s no indication of its value. Weibo has 129 million monthly active users, according to Sina’s most recent earnings report. That’s from well over half a billion registered users.

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The National People’s Congress (NPC) commenced today in Beijing to rubber stamp new policies and show the unity of the Communist Party. But sitting around all day to take part in a scripted ritual can be tedious work, and the temptation for bored lawmakers to WeChat friends back in their home provinces or play a few rounds of Temple Run can be overwhelming. It’s quite common for officials to be caught on camera hunched over their smartphones as the ceremony goes on around them.

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Sina’s latest earnings call revealed the company’s Twitter-like social forum Sina Weibo added 2.5 million daily active users last quarter. The number rose 4.2 percent from 58.9 million in September to 61.4 million in December. Those numbers might seem a bit off if you remember the Q3 report. Back then, Sina reported 60.2 million users in September – more than the starting point for Q4. That’s because Sina “adjusted our historical DAU numbers down slightly to conform our methodologies in counting DAU with other publicicly traded social media companies which include certain paying users.”